Brian Raif's Blog, page 2

Tyler Rose City Comic Con Wrap Up

Wow…what a weekend! I finally managed to get myself back up and going so I could write this before my deadline. I was exhausted, I am still sick and none of that makes me regret the weekend I spent at Tyler Rose City Comic Con! I sold a lot of books, spoke at a panel (that I didn’t know I was a part of until a few hours before), met several readers, was reunited with my childhood best friend, met Timothy Zahn, saw some awesome cosplay, saw some author friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, and...

NaNoWriMo season is upon us!

That’s right writers, it is that time of year again. Time to shut yourselves away from the world to sit in front of your computer and write 1,666 words per day for the next month: NaNoWriMo. Let just go ahead and call this the first of what is going to be several thin posts for the next month. Don’t worry, Tina won’t let me get away with missing a week, so make sure to check back every Wednesday for the next month to see how creative I can be to get out of writing a normal blog post on top of...

An Author in the Texas Renaissance Festival

Things have been pretty busy the last few weeks and I’ve got a lot of big announcements coming up in the near future. However, those things aren’t going to be ready to go for a while, so I thought I would tell you a bit about my amazing weekend at one of my favorite places on earth with a group of my favorite people.

So, when I am not writing, at the day job, or watching Doctor Who, a good portion of my time is spent attending and preparing for Renaissance faires. This last weekend, I went to...

Write what you know

“Write what you know.”

~Unknown (frequently attributed to Mark Twain )

I could write a whole post of how to interpret this writers’ turn of phrase. Actually, now that I write that, I am going to have to make a note to do that one day. Today, however, we are going to take that statement at face value, that we should only write about things we actually know about in real life.

The problem most people have with this statement is that they take it to mean that the extent of anything we write, eithe...

Six Seats: Part One

(The following work is nearly completely fan fiction. I am not the owner of most the characters in this story. If you like any of the characters in this story check out the notes below and please buy the works of the original authors so you can see that character written better than I can hope to.)

I couldn’t remember clearly how I found myself in the back seat of the black sedan, the route the car took, or even how far away I was from my home. When the car stopped and the door opened, it reve...

Saga of the Coffee Dragon: Chapter 1

So what does a writer do when he just can’t seem to put down words and refuses to leave his desk? He writes things like this, the first part in the Saga of the Coffee Dragon. This was one of my first experiments in how to use Twitter and honestly it didn’t manage to get much traction, but I still think it is funny and am working on putting together the second part!

For the sake of easy access I wanted to post the first installment in my little macro photography story here on my blog before I s...

Reading Will Find a Way

Growing up watching and reading science fiction led me to believe that all this technology was going to make our lives easier. But, as we all know, it only seems to have given us the ability to cram even more work into our lives. For instance, instead of spending my idle hours at my day job goofing off with my co-workers, I am here writing the beginning of this blog post. (If anyone from work is reading this – the store is completely empty and all the computers are fixed.) Perhaps in another...

Four Essential Books

I don’t always tell people what to read, but when I do you can bet that are some pretty damn good books.

Seriously, I am not someone who normally rams book recommendations down someone’s throat… most of the time. We’ve all built up such effective filters to advertising that we’ve even developed the ability to unconsciously process and forget recommendations by friends and peers who aren’t trying to sell us something. Some books are too good to be processed and pass off to file thirteen. That i...

Comics: Not just for kids!

“When you say ‘comic book’ in America, people think of Mickey Mouse and Archie. It has a connotation of juvenile.”

~Mark Hamill

Anyone who holds to the idea that comics are for kids seriously needs to set foot into a comic book store. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of great books out there for children and your local friendly comic book store is going to have tons of selections for the younger crowd to choose from, but not all the stories are for kids anymore. Truth be told, not many of th...

Goals

“Stay focused, go after your dreams and keep moving toward your goals.” ~LL Cool J

The following post may be more for myself than anyone else. Seriously, who else is going to worry about my goals for the next year? Still, perhaps there is something to be learned, so please read on. Maybe in a year we can see how things turned out.

Goal 1: Release three Codex Novels in the next year.

I can’t talk dates yet because several things are still in progress, but with the re-release of Knight of the Silv...